Studio process with custom-cast orthoses.
Photo: Kali Spitzer, for Art Basel Switzerland 2023.
I work from a small home base where sculpture, writing, and design are woven together in my bedroom and kitchen. I use many found, grown, foraged, or recycled materials including as gelatin, fabric, paper mache, plants, and biodegradable composites. These function as biological processors; recording care, humidity, temperature, contamination, and refuse as visible data. In this space, technological and biological systems blur, code, craft, metabolism, and maintenance operate on the same plane.
My practice draws from digital culture, technoculture, ecological systems, disability theory, and civic infrastructure, tracing how bodies adapt within and reimagine these intertwined environments. This practice functions as an ecological methodology, sparing excessive extraction while engaging with entropy, maintenance, and environmental feedback loops. Ambient conditions become collaborators: climate, decay, sterility, airflow, and time participate in the work’s formation.
I think of my work as a study of sensory maintenance: how bodies, images, plants, animals, and architectural armatures can sustain one another through small, continuous acts of tenderness within their environments.
My thinking is constellatory and nonlinear, communicating primarily through material, spatial, and sensory forms rather than verbal language. The work grows from lived experience, childhood illness, disability, and the systems that care for or abandon us. Sometimes a concept takes the form of a biomaterial sculpture; other times a pillow, quilt, civic framework, photo, meme, cake, document, or letter. The materials change, but the ethic stays constant: revealing the delicate symbioses that allow us to live with one another.
Access points are central to each system; sensory, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and environmental, inviting diverse forms of engagement across age groups, domestic animals, and even the nonhuman or invasive. The practice engages disability as an infrastructural and material condition within ecological and cybernetic systems, rather than identity. Each method introduces a new access point through environmental collaboration.
Note: A 2020 spinal procedure caused cord damage and a neurological condition that went undiagnosed for several years. My production rhythm shifted during this period, my processes have evolved within slower, long-term timelines.
↳ more on biomaterial sculpture + practice